Omnipotent political leader of Hamas in Gaza since 2017 – then, after the elimination of his alter ego, Ismaïl Haniyeh, in Tehran in July, undisputed leader of the Islamist movement – Sinwar had remained invisible since his troops launched into assault on the perimeter of the Palestinian enclave, executing nearly 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking some 250 hostages.
Messianic vision of conflict
Since then, probably holed up in the kilometers of tunnel dug by Hamas under the thin coastal strip, Sinwar sporadically gave signs of life to his intermediaries in Qatar, never letting go of his intransigent line in the sterile ceasefire negotiations. The one that opposing experts and generals had long liked to describe as “pragmatic” now seemed to be pursuing a messianic vision of the conflict, he who would have conceived the“Al-Aqsa flood operation” (as October 7 is known in the Arab world), as an explosion supposed to precipitate the Last Judgment. Initially an obscure lieutenant in the armed branch of Hamas, specialized in tracking down spies and defectors, the man whom the Gazans themselves nicknamed the “Butcher of Khan Younes” (his hometown) turned into a political tribune after twenty years. -two years spent in Israeli jails, until his release and return to the blockaded territory, in 2011, as part of the exchange between the Franco-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured and held by Hamas, and a thousand prisoners
Son “elimination” – which the Israeli army first said it was verifying when a photograph of a corpse with the same damaged teeth as the terrorist leader was circulating on social networks – was one of the main war objectives pursued by the Israeli Prime Minister , Benjamin Netanyahu, after that of the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in a massive bombing on Beirut on September 28.
Head of the moral police
Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, then under Egyptian control, which Israel would retake during the Six Day War five years later. His parents left Ashkelon, 40 kilometers further north, during the creation of Israel and the clashes and forced displacements that followed in 1948 – what Palestinians call the “Nakba”. He said he was forever marked by the sordid living conditions of his childhood – the daily queue to obtain rations, the teeming promiscuity of the shelters, transformed into concrete shantytowns. Very pious, the young man enters the orbit of an influential preacher in a wheelchair named Ahmed Yassine. When the first intifada broke out in 1987, the sheikh transformed his pietist association into a political and military movement, combining religious rigorism and exalted nationalism, dreaming of a Palestine “Muslim until the Last Judgment”. Hamas was born. Sinwar takes charge of his morality police, the Majd, tracking down “kouffars” and “collaborators”.
He was arrested the following year by Shin Beth, Israeli internal intelligence, for a series of murders of Palestinians designated as traitors. “He already had killer eyes, had entrusted to Liberation in November 2023 Micha Kobi, the interrogator in charge of his case. He was sentenced to four life sentences for four murders, out of the twelve attributed to him.” In prison, Sinwar does not seek to shed his reputation as a bare-handed strangler – his favorite technique – but is also noted for his reading of Zionist thinkers and his mastery of Hebrew.
Regularly transferred, Sinwar established himself as leader, each time taking charge of the wings reserved for Hamas affiliates. The ingenuity of inmate number 7333335 worries his guards as much as his charisma: he organizes hunger strikes, plans escape plans, cooks knafeh (cheese pastry) from small ingredients, and even wrote a novel about the need to sacrifice everything for “résistance”. In 2000, one of the prison doctors, Yuval Bitton, saved him from a stroke and became his confidant. Without ever being mistaken about his intentions, as he told Libé : “For him, there is [avait] as power, war and religion. He [pensait] to be a new Saladin.”
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Neo-politician
In 2006, Hamas won elections in the Occupied Territories, which led to a civil war in Gaza against Fatah’s secular rivals. The Islamists, ostracized by the international community, will emerge victorious. The enclave is placed under Israeli-Egyptian blockade. Sinwar follows all this closely from his cell – he is even interviewed there by Israeli TV, suggesting that Hamas is ready to accept the idea of a “hudna” (great truce). But it was above all the kidnapping of soldier Shalit, at the same time, which excited him. Managed, in part, by his own brother, the hostage taking allowed, after endless negotiations in which Sinwar, equipped with a clandestine telephone, was involved, the release of a thousand Palestinian prisoners five years later . Including his own.
Sunken cheeks, close-cropped and ashen hair, Sinwar returns to Gaza crowned with his prison past. The neo-politician climbed the ranks of the opaque Hamas organizational chart, and became, in 2017, its political leader in the Gaza Strip. The ex-nervi blows hot and cold, presenting a relatively “reformist” program, focused on reconciliation with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, an overhaul of the Hamas charter and timid diplomatic overtures considering a form of two-way solution. States. The following year, Sinwar summoned the international press – including Liberation – to Gaza to sell his moult: he announces a cycle of “peaceful marches” along the barbed wire surrounding the enclave. No one perceives the threat of his harangue, while Israeli snipers fire on the demonstrators: “This fence is not a sacred cow that we are not allowed to touch!”
Blindly
At the same time, Sinwar claims to improve the living conditions of Gazans, who receive financial support from Qatar. Netanyahu lets it happen – we are talking, in Israel, about the equation “cash in exchange for calm”. Sinwar even swears, when handed a microphone, that a war is doomed to failure in the face of Israel’s nuclear power. But every time the tap runs dry, rockets rain.
In 2021, a blitzkrieg broke out, caused by a series of clashes in Jerusalem. After eleven days of bombing, Sinwar emerges unscathed and declares victory. The Israeli high-ranking officers hesitate to assassinate him, but give up, still convinced of being able to maneuver the Islamist hawk. Even when he promises “religious war” when Netanyahu’s extremist allies enter the Esplanade des Mosques.
A blindness that Israel will pay dearly on October 7. In the following months, Sinwar became a ghost – a monster haunting Israelis and a hero of the Arab streets, seen as the avenger of decades of humiliation. Although invisible and elusive, it sets the tone for ceasefire negotiations, which are constantly aborted, with the exception of a short week of winter truce. Over the months, the echoes from the Gaza tunnels declared him a die-hard, even millenarian, regardless of the losses of his people – more than 40,000 dead. It remains to be seen, and nothing is less certain, whether his will put an end to a war of incredible violence, of which he will forever be considered the bloodthirsty trigger.
